this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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So seriously, what's going to replace Discord? Everyone wants to leave, but to where?
And no, Matrix is not and will never be a viable alternative
I've seen mentioned these:
Why is "one-to-one clone of Discord" the goal for everyone? Why not set your sights on a making a good UX instead?
ngl, discord kinda had the best UX before the enshittification began
Hard disagree, but there are millions of people using it so what do I know.
I don't think it's necessarily the goal — Discord is just a helpful yardstick to compare things to as a baseline (and some people are looking for something that replaces Discord as closely as possible). Having to switch services is a pain, and whilst it's not optimal in the long term to just try to replace a thing with a clone, I can see why people don't have the executive function energy to think too hard about this.
Well, Discord's UI is certainly not the holy grail, but it's quite functional and people are used to it. So it's pretty much logical you copy the concept to some extent when you want to appeal to these people?
Stoat still doesn't have screenshare. It's also a bloody stupid name - I have no idea who thought that re-brand was a good idea.
Fluxer seems to support it though.
BNoth can be self-hosted, which is a nice bonus.
Do people really use screen share that much? (Sadly) I use discord to reach a lot of my friends for multiple years and we actually used screen share maybe twice? Three times?
I have used it multiple times every day this week.
I use it daily for both work and play.
In 3d work and game dev it's often far easier to just show people things quickly through it.
When playing coop games our group will all stream so we can see everyone's PoV. We'll also occasionally use it to watch a movie together.
It's one of the single most used features there are outside of voip and text.
It's Mandatory for a discord alterative.
This is a big reason why every alterative keeps failing. Linux and open source users are so fucking out of touch with normal users it's absurd. They want and focus on all the wrong things and then complain when their apps don't get popular.
Like federation is cool and all but literally fuck and all people give a single flying fuck about it outside of the nerdy in crowd.
Screen sharing on the other hand is a hard line the majority of normal users either refuse to live with out or have friends that do. Thus making it a make it or break it for most groups.
I personally use it quite a lot, as do my friends. Typically use it to stream a movie to watch together, or to share the game they're playing while we talk.
So you're saying there are options.
Doesn't Stoat charge far out the ass?
There are actually many, many options. It's hard to guess which one will get the momentum and lift off though. You probably don't want to convince all your friends to switch to another platform just to see it die in half a year...
It has a built-in blog feature that communities or individuals can use to post announcements or articles to the whole instance, but it's pretty easily ignored by just clicking the messages tab, which doesn't show them at all, and makes the interface look more like Discord.
I've also seen Roomy and Voltage mentioned around too but haven't personally looked into them.
The MIT license of Voltage is a big red flag for me, as it could allow for either a corporate takeover, or for the company to abandon the open-source version in favor of a closed-source version that they can sell or enshittify.
Roomy has pretty much the same problem being licensed under the MPL license, which allows for the project to be packaged into a closed-source proprietary product. I'd avoid it too, despite it being federated. The license is just too risky, and the only reason not to choose GPL is because the devs likely want that capital purchase exit strategy.
There's a lot devs who know there's potentially a lot of money to be made in a successful Discord alternative. They smell the blood in the water, know the venture capital vultures it attracts, and they'll try to exploit the free labor that open-source projects bring, only to sell us out down the road after all the work has been done.
I'd say any option we move to must be licensed under GPL as a hard requirement, as that ensures it can never be exploited by corpos, and will remain owned by the community forever so that we don't have to migrate again any time soon.
The two best options on the table that fill that niche are:
Thank you for the information on the license of both programs!
With LiveKit for calls / screen share, it is for my group. Though I'm not saying it doesn't have issues.
Community-developed homeservers like continuwuity have gotten a lot of new support on the last few weeks. Clients like cinny are getting pretty close to a replacement ux wise (if you look at PR2599 on Cinny's GitHub, they are working on and will soon merge support for LiveKit in a way that is very close to voice channels).
I also generally think that the only way to replace Discord as an ecosystem where you talk to many people from different communities is a federated protocol, not a bunch of new silos, one for each community.
I have no first person experience but I've read Matrix' lack of "Discord-like server" grouping is terrible for moderation where you have to manually set permissions for each "room". If that's actually true it's literally impossible for it to become proper discord alternative.
I've moved to Matrix from Discord for two small friend groups (<6 people each). Matrix is a fine replacement for the small friend Discord. But it has awhile to go before it can replace 1000+ people servers
The bigger issue is that reports currently don't federate. A report will always go to the admin of your homeserver (which might be you) not the admin of the homeserver the room you're in is on, nor the admin of the homeserver of the other users.
Most larger (1-2k people) communities get around that by just having you ping the mods in reply to the offending content, which is a band-aid.
A spec for federated reports is apparently being worked on, but not yet available.
A discord server-like would be a space, containing channel-like rooms. The main difference is that rooms can also exist independent of spaces, if you just need a single chat for some people instrad of a group of chats.
You can set permissions for a whole space, it's just that they currently work differently than Discord. Members have a power level, and you set the power level from which each function is available. So, e.g. Sending messages from Pl 0 (representing normal users), banning users from PL 50 (representing moderators), changing server settings from level 100 (representing administrators).
It sounds complicated, but once you get used to it it's pretty easy.
The problem isn't that there are no alternatives. It's that there's like 50 alternatives. Centralization makes us vulnerable, but it's also super convenient.
There's a reason we preferred reddit and now Lemmy instead of different forums with different logins for everything.
The biggest problem with getting off Discord is fragmentation of communities.
Reddit can't die fast enough. I miss niche subreddits
Don't worry, it's trying to speedrun its downfall.
First one of those contenders that solves federation in a nice way would be a winner. Quite a lot of them has it on their roadmap so my hopes are not completely lost.
I could probably just google this... but I think I just want to hear a real person explain something this time :P
What do you mean by "solves federation"? As in bringing disparate groups together under a single app?
My, probably very bad, understanding would be something along the lines of a shared, decentralized API. Almost like a specialized internet that only serves the functions of the apps.
There's Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer. Additionally, Steam has many Discord-like features in app.
I don’t like how fluxer is already paywalling features that other platforms don’t. It feels like discord all over again
Fluxer is AGPv3, recently promised to remove their CLA so the software stays free forever, has an ambitious roadmap with federation, and is currently being worked on by one 22 yr old dude.
It's very different than Discord.
This chad needs help. I'm more than happy to support him. This is an investment in Open Source™ and the future. If he can't work on this full-time or near full-time, he's gonna need to work for Google or some shit. Then it's never going to be able to compete with Discord.
They're also not going to be able to run Fluxer on powerful enough hardware. Take a look at Stoat. Similar idea. No funding. Their main server is HELLA slow, which I don't think it's their fault. The app is written in Rust, but it feels like it's running on a potato.
I might be wrong here, but I thought you could self-host Fluxer to get around the paywalls. So you could do that. What a gift! And federation is on the way, so maybe one day you can self-host AND talk to other instances! Amazing!
The cla removal is already done I thought on the Canary branch.
Thank you for adding more information I’d only had a surface look at Fluxer
E: It seems like the documentation page for self hosting currently is incomplete
IRC never left.
My group left about 5 years ago (give or take a couple) when there was a hostile takeover of freenode. I haven't really looked into it at all since then, is freenode back or where did everyone move to?
Everyone moved to libera. It literally happened right as the freenode fiasco happened, so I am surprised you and your group didn't hear about it.
Does irc even have voice? Or game streaming? Or emojis? Or persistent chat where if you're out of service or offline but then you come back into service/online you can see what you missed?
I’m interested to know why matrix isn’t viable for you? I’ve been trialing it recently with friends and it seems to tick all our boxes. I do admit I don’t do large communities personally
Someone has made a large spreadsheet of discord alternatives, with comparisons of features, that might help people decide: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14vicw-V9Z5m7ckuburP5wxyDIIb_fFJFEjnxxHk8qRw/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Why not? I've been using Matrix for a few years now. I like it, but it definitely lacks refinement and isn’t particularly user-friendly.
I think of it a bit as being the Linux of messaging platforms.
Slack seems cool to me and my friends, is it not cool to other people?
Slack is the polar opposite of cool.
Might as well go with Microsoft Teams at that point
Ouch. It's not that bad.
It's owned by Salesforce. Big ick.
Slack is a subscription per user so far as I know